Shelf Life: 33 Million Things at the American Museum of Natural History

What if you could open up a drawer full of hundreds of pinned insect specimens to study them under a microscope, or unscrew the jar cap to scan a curious creature that swam in the deep sea decades ago? For collectors everywhere, this is a lovely series from the American Museum of Natural History: Shelf Life, episode 1 – 33 Million Things.

From centuries-old specimens to entirely new types of specialized collections like frozen tissues and genomic data, the Museum’s scientific collections (with more than 33,430,000 specimens and artifacts) form an irreplaceable record of life on Earth, the span of geologic time, and knowledge about our vast universe.

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